I can’t believe I missed it, but a month ago this site turned four years old. I count September 1st as the official birthday of the site. (Although the actual “launch” date is a somewhat abstract idea. I mean, nobody read this thing at the time, and I used timestamps to organize the first posts without regard to when they actually went up. Which didn’t matter anyway because hey, no audience.)
My father was an English major, and a poet by trade. This would confuse people who met him:
“What do you do?”
To which he would answer in his deep, gravely voice, “I’m a poet.”
There would be this little pause, followed by the question, “No, I mean what do you do for a living?”
Dad would smile, “That is what I do for a living.”
This was perhaps overselling things a bit. It was true that poetry was the only work he did, but it didn’t really earn him a proper living in an economic sense. He’d had a massive stroke at 30 which left him partly paralyzed. He spent the next 29 years living alone, slightly impoverished, and moving every couple of years or so to escape the trail of bills and debts that always followed him around.
I didn’t really spend time with him or get to know him until I was entering my teens, and it wasn’t until I was grown that the two of us clicked and became friends.
Dad always said that “poetry is a performance art”. To him, reading poetry to yourself was like reading the script for a play instead of seeing it performed. You can do that if you want, but you’re probably missing out. He self-published books of his work as a way of earning cigarette money, but what he really loved was reading for an audience. Back in the 90’s there was a coffee shop in Slippery Rock which had a weekly poetry… thing. My dad was some sort of local celebrity / folk hero / mentor / crank for the college students who hung out there. The poetry readings were more or less open mic, although there seemed to be some unspoken rule that dad – the only non-student who ever took the stage – was the “headline” act. A few of his followers were musicians, and sometimes they would play backup music while he read.
When I visited him in his dusty, smoke-infused apartment he’d often read me some of his recent work. I could tell it pained him when I didn’t get it. I thought of poetry as just a very roundabout and imprecise form of storytelling. When he was done I’d always ask him who the poem was about or where it took place. If he mentioned a man in his poem, I’d ask if he was anyone I knew. There was this artistic rift between us. He was a poet and an abstract thinker, and I was a computer programmer and a slightly obtuse concrete thinker. I could tell he was always trying to bring me into his world. I guess he wanted me to be a writer. Not intensely, as a father trying to live vicariously through his offspring, but in a more casual, “It would be cool if you were into this” sort of way. We got along well enough, and we were both more amused than frustrated at the ways we didn’t understand each other.
In the last four years on this blog I’ve discovered, to my own amazement, that I love writing more than I love programming. Or maybe I’ve just finally had my fill of code after three decades. I don’t know. I wrote a book, and I can tell I’ve got another one in my head even if I don’t have the time to set it down right now. I’ve even dabbled in poetry a bit, which would astound the man if he were alive today.
This blog has changed the trajectory of my career, taught me about writing, and given me a better understanding of a man who died five years before I put up the first post. Not bad, as far as unintended consequences go.
I’m glad that during this strange journey you’ve been able to find some entertainment value in it. Thanks for reading.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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